BURIAL → SIGNS → ROOSTER
The wind carried the smell of sage before Dakota saw the smoke.
It curled from Joseph Blackburn’s hands and disappeared into the March Wyoming air, carried across a cemetery where snow still clung stubbornly to the shadows between the graves.
Dakota Iman Redfeather stood between her mother and Uncle Micah.
Sixteen years old.
Black dress.
Black coat.
Her mother’s hand shaking inside hers.
The open grave waited several yards away.
Two folded blankets rested beside it.
Red.
Blue.
Dakota stared at them because they were easier to look at than the hole in the earth.
Her father’s casket had not arrived yet.
Iman squeezed her hand.
“He would have hated this cold.”
Dakota almost smiled.
Her father had operated in places most Americans would never see and done things most people could barely imagine, but Wyoming winter had always pissed him off.
Once, when Dakota was twelve, he told her cold was insidious.
Fire gave you something to fight.
Cold simply convinced your body to stop working.
She hadn’t understood the word then.
She did now.
Her father’s body had spent the last year doing exactly that.
Stopping.
Slowly.
Without explanation.
· · ·
Ten years later, Jimmy’s memoir was open on Dakota’s laptop.
She sat alone at the dining table in the Amangani residence.
Their residence now.
September had begun turning the edges of Wyoming toward fall.
Jimmy was outside somewhere.
He had taken quickly to what Dakota jokingly called cowboy life.
He wasn’t a cowboy.
Probably never would be.
But he had stopped behaving like someone visiting Wyoming.
His clothes were here.
His records.
Books.
Art.
Wine.
His life.
Clients increasingly came to him.
Jackson worked.
People who normally controlled rooms in New York, Washington, Silicon Valley, London, or wherever else Jimmy’s universe extended seemed perfectly willing to fly into Wyoming when he asked them to.
When they couldn’t, Jimmy worked by phone.
Video.
Sometimes fifteen minutes.
Sometimes four hours.
Dakota had her own work now.
It had started with his.
She had read the memoir once.
Then twice.
The third time, she stopped at the Gulf War.
Desert Shield.
Desert Storm.
Dakota leaned closer.
Her father had served there.
So had Micah.
Now Jimmy.
Three men.
Same war.
Different lives.
She kept reading.
Then went backward.
Then forward.
Then back again.
Something bothered her.
· · ·
The drums had started before Eli Redfeather’s casket reached the grave.
Dakota remembered feeling them before hearing them.
A deep pulse moving through the earth and into her chest.
Then the voices.
Honor songs.
Arapaho words she knew and others she didn’t.
Her father had respected the language even though he never mastered it.
He had spent thirty years among people who understood that belonging did not always require sameness.
Her mother stood beside Dakota listening.
Iman had come from Ethiopia.
Eli had brought her into his life.
Wind River had eventually brought her into theirs.
That morning, none of those distinctions mattered.
A military family was burying one of its own.
A Native community was burying one of its own.
A wife was burying her husband.
Dakota was burying her father.
And nobody knew why he was dead.
· · ·
She drove to Micah the next morning.
He was outside when the Land Cruiser pulled up.
Dakota got out carrying her laptop.
“Were you ever sick after the Gulf War?”
Micah looked at her.
“What kind of sick?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s helpful.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
Dakota sat.
“Dad.”
That changed him.
She opened the laptop.
“I’ve been reading Jimmy’s memoir.”
Micah waited.
“He was in the Gulf too.”
“I know.”
Dakota turned the screen toward him.
“I keep seeing the same words.”
She had been reading medical literature and veterans’ accounts late into the night.
“Fatigue. Joint pain. Memory problems. Respiratory problems. Stomach issues. Sleep. Pain that moves around. Things doctors can’t explain.”
Micah read.
Dakota watched his face.
“Did you ever have any of this?”
Micah looked back at her.
“You think that’s what killed your father?”
“I don’t know.”
“Good.”
Dakota frowned.
“Good?”
“You said you don’t know.”
He pushed the laptop toward her.
“Keep it that way until you do.”
Dakota understood.
No answer looking for evidence.
Evidence first.
Then the answer.
If there was one.
“Who else do you know?”
Micah leaned back.
“That came home sick?”
“Yes.”
He thought.
Then started giving her names.
· · ·
By the end, breathing had become work for Eli Redfeather.
Dakota remembered that more vividly than she wanted to.
Her father had once treated breath like another instrument under his control.
Control your breathing.
Control your fear.
Control your body.
He had taught her that as a child.
But near the end, every breath became negotiation.
Walking from the bedroom to the kitchen could exhaust him.
He couldn’t sleep.
Then slept too much.
His body hurt.
His bones hurt.
Some days his mind was sharp.
Other days he seemed somewhere else.
Doctors treated what they could identify.
Tested what they could measure.
Named what they could name.
Everything else remained suspended between possibility and uncertainty.
Maybe.
Could be.
We don’t know.
Her mother hated those words.
So did Dakota.
· · ·
The first veteran agreed to speak because Micah asked him.
The second because the first one called.
By the fifth interview, Dakota stopped thinking she was investigating her father.
Something larger was appearing.
Different units.
Different branches.
Different parts of Wyoming.
Some had diagnoses.
Some had collections of symptoms.
Some had filed claims.
Some had been denied.
Others had stopped asking.
Dakota listened.
Recorded when they permitted it.
Took notes when they didn’t.
She asked the same questions different ways.
When did it start?
What changed?
What did the doctors say?
What did VA say?
What did your family notice first?
Who else from your unit got sick?
What happened when you filed?
What happened when you were denied?
The answers weren’t identical.
That mattered.
She wasn’t looking for identical.
She was looking for pattern.
· · ·
At her father’s funeral, veterans seemed to appear from everywhere.
Army.
Navy.
Marines.
Men and women Dakota knew.
Others she had never met.
Some had served with Eli.
Some knew Micah.
Others had simply heard that a veteran was going into the ground on Wind River.
One older woman wore a Navy windbreaker.
Sarah Clearwater.
She had crossed paths with Eli during his career.
She found Dakota later at the community center after the burial.
“You’re Dakota.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Your father talked about you.”
Dakota didn’t know what to say.
Everybody had a story about her father now.
Sarah lowered her voice.
Then said something Dakota never forgot.
There were other veterans getting sick.
Gulf War veterans.
Symptoms that didn’t always fit the textbooks.
People wondered about what they had breathed.
Touched.
Burned.
Carried.
What had been in the air.
The water.
The dust.
Nobody seemed certain.
Dakota listened.
She was sixteen.
She didn’t know what to do with the information.
Ten years later, she did.
· · ·
She reached backward into the Navy.
The network was still there.
Sailors she’d served beside.
Marines she’d worked around.
Corpsmen.
Photographers.
Public-affairs people.
People from Kandahar.
People from Bagram.
Men and women scattered across the country who could go years without seeing one another and still recognize the name flashing across a phone.
Dakota started privately.
One message.
You remember anyone coming home sick?
Then another.
Anybody in your family serve in the Gulf?
A former shipmate responded.
A corpsman sent a phone number.
A Marine told her his father had served during Desert Storm.
Someone had medical records.
Someone knew a widow.
One message became five.
Five became twenty.
California.
Virginia.
Texas.
Florida.
Different wars started appearing.
Iraq.
Afghanistan.
Different exposures.
Different symptoms.
Different generations of American service.
But the question underneath them sounded increasingly familiar.
What happened after we came home?
Wyoming had given her the story.
The military gave her the network.
· · ·
Jimmy began noticing the paper.
Printed reports covered the dining table.
Names.
Dates.
Medical terminology.
VA records.
Government reports.
Handwritten timelines.
One night he found Dakota sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by stacks.
“You planning an invasion?”
Dakota didn’t look up.
“Maybe.”
“How many?”
“Interviews?”
“Yeah.”
“Twenty-three.”
Jimmy stopped.
“Twenty-three?”
“Twenty-four tomorrow.”
He looked at the paper around her.
“What are you looking for?”
Dakota finally raised her eyes.
“I’ll tell you when I know.”
Jimmy smiled.
“Fair.”
He poured himself a bourbon.
Then left her alone.
He knew exactly what he’d been doing when he handed a combat correspondent his memoir.
What he hadn’t known was where she would start and take it.
· · ·
The rifle volley at her father’s funeral had been violent.
Three explosions across Wind River.
Birds lifted from the trees.
Her mother flinched.
Micah didn’t.
Neither did the veterans.
Dakota remembered thinking how strange it was that violence could express honor.
Then came the flag.
Perfectly folded.
Red.
White.
Blue.
A military representative placed it into Iman’s hands.
On behalf of the President.
The Secretary of the Navy.
A grateful nation.
Dakota believed those words.
She still did.
· · ·
That was precisely why the questions mattered.
Loving the country didn’t require pretending the country always got everything right.
Honor didn’t eliminate obligation.
Gratitude didn’t end when the uniform came off.
Her mother was harder.
Iman had lived the final years.
She didn’t need Dakota reopening them.
They had buried Eli.
Nothing Dakota discovered could change that.
One night Dakota brought the laptop to her mother’s kitchen table anyway.
No theory.
No diagnosis.
No promises.
Just questions.
When did the fatigue begin?
What hurt first?
When did the breathing change?
What did he stop doing?
What happened at night?
What did the doctors ask?
What didn’t they ask?
Her mother began remembering.
Appointments.
Pain.
Sore bones.
Sleep.
The things they’d assumed were age.
Stress.
War.
Life.
Things nobody had thought to connect.
Dakota typed.
Her mother watched.
“You think they missed something?”
Dakota stopped.
“I think we didn’t know what questions to ask.”
Iman stared at the table.
Something changed.
Not closure.
Dakota couldn’t give her that.
But perhaps context.
After ten years of unexplained loss, context was not nothing.
· · ·
The investigation stopped being only medical.
It became institutional.
Records lived in different places.
Agencies used different definitions.
A doctor could recognize an illness without knowing what caused it.
One office could recognize a problem another office lacked authority to address.
Someone could care deeply and still tell a veteran no.
The bureaucracy wasn’t necessarily malicious.
Most of the people she encountered seemed to care.
The machinery could still fail.
Jurisdiction.
Eligibility.
Documentation.
Evidence.
Regulations.
Deadlines.
Definitions.
A veteran could be demonstrably sick and still spend years trying to establish why.
For Native veterans, another layer emerged.
Distance.
Transportation.
Access.
Trust.
Federal institutions.
Tribal communities.
Rural Wyoming.
Separate systems touching the same veteran without necessarily touching one another.
The more Dakota learned, the angrier she became.
The angrier she became, the more disciplined she got.
She didn’t need outrage.
She needed evidence.
· · ·
The combat correspondent was back.
Not because Jimmy told her she should become one again.
She simply started working.
She interviewed veterans before breakfast.
Ran.
Made calls from the Land Cruiser.
Worked occasional shifts at The Cowboy Bar and sometimes left with another name somebody had quietly slipped across the bar.
Read government documents late into the night.
Called offices when they opened.
Veterans when they got home from work.
Families after dinner.
She checked claims.
Then checked the person making them.
She had once documented Americans at war.
Now she was documenting what happened to them afterward.
Increasingly, people called her.
· · ·
At the cemetery, the casket disappeared beneath the earth one shovel at a time.
That sound had never left Dakota.
Dirt striking wood.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Her mother stared.
“I don’t understand.”
Micah tried.
“They did everything they could.”
Iman looked at him.
“But it wasn’t enough.”
· · ·
Dakota had spent ten years remembering that sentence.
Now she understood it differently.
Doing everything a system knew how to do was not necessarily the same thing as doing everything that needed to be done.
Micah called one afternoon.
“We’ve got people coming in.”
“Who?”
“Veterans.”
“How many?”
“More than your living room can hold.”
Dakota looked around the Amangani residence.
“When?”
“Saturday.”
She hung up.
Jimmy was sitting near the windows reading.
“We need chairs.”
He looked up.
“How many?”
“I don’t know.”
Jimmy stood.
Dakota pointed at him.
“No.”
Jimmy stopped.
“No what?”
“No fixing it.”
“I was going to ask how many chairs.”
“I know you.”
Jimmy smiled.
“Your show.”
She was already walking away.
· · ·
Saturday changed everything.
Veterans came.
Spouses.
Widows.
Native veterans from Wind River.
Older men and women from the Gulf War.
Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.
People drove across Wyoming.
Others called.
Nobody agreed on everything.
They didn’t need to.
Stories became names.
Names became records.
Records became questions.
One veteran knew somebody at VA.
Another knew somebody in Cheyenne.
Someone knew a physician studying deployment-related illness.
Someone else knew a legislator.
Dakota listened.
Then organized.
Who needed records.
Who needed medical documentation.
Who had filed.
Who had been denied.
Who had never tried.
Who would speak publicly.
Who would not.
By late afternoon nobody was asking Dakota whether there was a problem.
They were asking her what came next.
She looked around the room.
Research had become responsibility.
· · ·
The first official meeting bored Dakota nearly to death.
The second pissed her off.
By the third, she understood the game.
Everybody cared.
Everybody controlled something.
Nobody controlled everything.
Doctors could discuss illness.
VA could discuss benefits.
Veterans organizations could advocate.
State officials could discuss outreach.
Legislators could ask questions.
Families could wait.
Dakota sat at those tables with a notebook and began learning the difference between journalism and public power.
Finding truth was not the same thing as producing action.
Sometimes the truth already existed.
Buried in reports.
Studies.
Testimony.
Regulations.
Medical records.
The problem was getting somebody with authority to respond to it.
Then Cheyenne called.
They wanted to hear from Dakota Iman Redfeather.
· · ·
The last time Dakota had watched her father leave a public room, six men were carrying his casket.
She remembered the precision.
The synchronized steps.
Micah among them.
Her father’s simple ash casket moving through the people who had gathered to say goodbye.
Control.
Discipline.
Do the job correctly regardless of the circumstances.
Her father would have noticed every detail.
Dakota had inherited more of him than she realized.
· · ·
Dakota drove to Cheyenne.
Jimmy went with her.
So did her mother.
Micah.
A handful of veterans.
She carried her laptop.
A notebook.
The records veterans had trusted her with.
No speech.
No grand plan.
Just evidence.
For the next several hours, people listened.
Then they asked questions.
Dakota answered what she could.
When she didn’t know, she said so.
She did not claim every unexplained illness was caused by military service.
She did not promise grieving families that she had solved what medicine had not.
She talked about evidence.
Patterns.
Veterans who had spent years searching for explanations.
Families who had become caregivers, advocates, and record keepers because somebody had to.
Native veterans traveling long distances for care.
Veterans who had stopped filing claims.
Veterans who had stopped asking questions.
Widows still trying to understand what had happened.
Then she talked about Eli.
Not how her father died.
How he lived after he came home.
The fatigue.
The pain.
The sore bones.
The breathing.
The things he stopped doing.
The questions nobody could answer.
Her mother sat behind her.
Dakota never turned around.
She didn’t need to.
· · ·
At Eli Redfeather’s funeral, a grateful nation had given his widow a flag.
Dakota had believed in the gesture then.
She believed in it now.
But she understood something at twenty-six she could not have understood at sixteen.
A grateful nation owed its warriors more than gratitude.
That was why she was here.
Not to accuse.
Not to speculate.
Not to diminish the honor of service.
To honor it.
And to keep asking.
· · ·
When the meeting ended, Dakota began gathering her papers.
She didn’t get far.
A veterans-service officer wanted her research.
Someone wanted another meeting.
Someone had another veteran she needed to speak with.
Someone wanted her back in Cheyenne.
· · ·
Three months earlier, Jimmy had seen potential.
He had simply placed the first piece of evidence in Dakota’s hands.
Now he was looking at something else.
Trajectory.
· · ·
That evening, Dakota drove back to Wind River alone.
The cemetery was quiet.
Summer was beginning to surrender to fall.
Her father’s grave no longer looked new.
Dakota stood in front of it.
For a long time she said nothing.
At sixteen she had believed she would spend the rest of her life carrying the unanswered question of why her father had died.
She still didn’t know.
Maybe she never would.
But the question had changed.
It no longer belonged only to Dakota.
Or Iman.
Or Micah.
Veterans across Wyoming had trusted her with theirs.
Dakota lowered herself beside the headstone.
Ran her fingers across her father’s name.
Elias Redfeather.
Navy.
Father.
Protector.
She remembered him underwater.
Strong.
Certain.
Invincible.
Then the hospital.
Then the funeral.
Then Cheyenne.
· · ·
Dakota knelt.
The Wyoming wind moved through her long black hair.
She pressed play.
She knew he could hear it.
Alice in Chains.
“Rooster.”
· · ·
Dakota whispered.
“For God and country.”
■ ■ ■
SEASON I · EPISODE IX